Archives for June 2011

Science of Mind teaches us that we are innately and unalterably whole — with nothing broken and nothing missing at the core of our being. Our principles are based in the understanding that Wholeness, which is a Quality of God, is the eternal and unchangeable divine truth of who and what we are. This was such good news to me when I began my spiritual studies! It was something I had never known and never been told and hearing it opened me not only to a new dimension of awareness but also to the possibility of a renewed and happy life.

For me, the path of Science of Mind has been a long journey and a step-by-step process of embodying and living this truth. It has taken dedicated work to first realize my wholeness (and I had to have a realization before I could live a revelation) and then to express this in the world. I had to be willing to engage with and use for awakening what my life dished up for me. I was often guided by Ram Dass’s advice, “Take what shows up on your plate and transform it until it feeds you.” All the events of my life, particularly the most painful ones, have fed my awareness of where and how I was living my wounding or limitation and not my wholeness.

They nourished me in getting about the healing. More than a spiritual concept, wholeness has become a living reality I seek to demonstrate and express every day through choices of practice and behavior which are available to us all: meditation to lift our consciousness to oneness; spiritual mind treatment to speak our word of good into form; exercise to express power and health; words and acts of love to be God’s Self-Givingness to creation; attending to necessary tasks to be in integrity with ourselves and our commitments. Our divine birthright is a life of joy, beauty, abundance, contribution and peace. We may begin any moment we choose. As George Eliot wrote, “It is never too late to be who you might have been.” It is never too late to be the wholeness you truly are.

A wonderful dimension of reality opened for me as a metaphysical perspective of life dawned in my awareness. The first clue came in a Baptist church Sunday school room in which youngsters my own age of 13 or so were reciting Bible quotations to chapter and verse prompts called out by a teacher. As a new arrival both to the church and to such an exercise, I could not answer what I didn’t know. I heard beautiful words of important and loved New Testament passages and noticed that they were spoken without explanation of a greater meaning I could sense living within those words. I knew that there was something missing that I wanted to find, and my quest for meaning beyond the literal interpretation of words and things began.

My path carried me through the works of John Donne, William Blake, the American Transcendentalists and Emerson’s writing about the oneness at the core of existence. A mystical experience opened me to the realization that I am part of a great wholeness of life, and that where I truly live and move and have my being is in something grand yet unseen. I was ripe for Science of Mind, and was led into it by a fascination with the mental and emotional equivalents of illness. I learned that we are Spirit, Mind and Body — one thing on three levels of expression – and that the healing of bodies and conditions is supported by transforming the equivalents that underlie them. I entered formal Science of Mind study to be a Licensed Practitioner so that I might support others in realizing within themselves, and then revealing in their living, the unalterable wholeness within.

The metaphysical perception of life always has me knowing that there is more going on than what I can see. It helps me remember that all circumstances and situations can be used for awakening to greater spiritual truth and awareness, and for lifting into higher levels of good and freedom. I find this true in my personal life, I see it in the life of others, and I believe this is true in the collective experiences we have in groups, in communities and in our world. We are in a time of what some term “unprecedented changes” with difficulties in many places. Spiritual awareness does not deny that this is so. But it does call us up to seek higher meaning and to embrace the dance we do, centered as we are, between heaven and earth.

Ernest Holmes wrote in Science of Mind that if a spiritual treatment could be seen it would be seen as a pathway of light. Such is the power of prayer to illumine our way by dispelling the darkness of error thinking and making radiant the truth of the Presence of God and the unchanging wholeness of our individual being. I notice that my active prayer for ease and grace in difficult situations fulfills itself in exactly that experience. My treatment to know the good at the heart of all people – even the ones who challenge me – allows me to see beyond their “distressing disguises,” as Mother Theresa described the less-than-perfection we all display at times.

When I am concerned about my children, I treat my own consciousness to remember that they belong to God and that they each on a unique path and unalterably complete at the core. I watch as they continue to flourish and unfold just like beautiful flowers that can only bloom into full expression. As I contemplate the world in which we live, my prayer is for my ability to see that God is all there is. I view current world conditions as prayer requests our collective experience is issuing. And I do my prayer work to know and accept that the reality of Spirit and the Good of Life manifests for all people, for all beings everywhere. And despite all the difficulties, and because of the power of prayer, this is what I see.

In a very real way, we are the prayer that God is praying – each of us a divine idea sent forth from Spirit to do great good, each embodying God’s Infinite Nature in a uniquely fashioned and unrepeatable way. We are birthed from the One to dwell on earth so that the reality of God might be welcomed and lived in human expression. We are the gift God has given to reveal Itself more fully. A Sufi story tells of a man who was overcome with sorrow about the condition of the world. He was so distraught that he sat on the earth and pounded it saying, “God, why do you allow this. Why haven’t you done something.” And after a moment of silence God spoke, saying, “I did do something. I sent you.”